In the continuing advancements in recovery of natural resources, such as oil and natural gas trapped in underground formations, many companies use computer systems to help synthesize data from a plurality of wells to obtain an overall picture of the underground formation. Such synthesis assists geologists in making determinations such as the best reservoir extraction technique, and whether and where to drill additional wells to aid the extraction.
Each well, however, may have multiple pieces of information associated with the well. For example, a well may have: measured resistivity over a plurality of depths; measured porosity over the plurality of depths; and measured macroscopic capture cross section over the plurality of depths. Related art visualization techniques pick one data type and display the data correlated to depth as a “lathe” display. That is, the one data type is selected, and for each particular depth the particular data value associated with the depth is “spun” around the well trajectory such that the apparent inside diameter of the well in the visualization is based on the value of the data at the particular depth. While the lathe technique may adequately display a single data set, in many situations the geologist may need to visualize the correlation between two or more formation parameters, such as resistivity and porosity at a particular depth. The lathe technique does not adequately address such needs.
Thus, any advance in the synthesis and visualization of data for one or more wells would provide a competitive advantage in the market place.